With starters in short supply, teams turn to relievers

	Adam Wainwright served as the closer on the Cardinals' World Series champions but is happy to be in the starting rotation for 2007. Charles LeClaire/WireImage.com
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Adam Wainwright is in the rotation for the World Series champion Cardinals for a lot of reasons. Necessity, for one. The defection of a couple of starters, the return of the team's All-Star closer ... you don't need to look far for the reasons Wainwright, who finished 2006 as St. Louis' Series-clinching closer, is starting these days. They're all over the place.

Whether he and many other relievers-turned-starters remain in their respective rotations, though, isn't nearly as clear. That depends on whether the Cards' young right-hander and his fellow bullpen breakouts show that they can make a successful transition from cleaning up to leading off. It's never an easy trick.

So far this season, six pitchers who appeared in at least 35 games in relief last year had morphed into starters, with varying results. Some, such as the Cardinals' Braden Looper, were longtime bullpen dwellers. Looper had appeared in 572 games in a nine-year career before making his first two starts this season.

Some were one-time starters getting another chance at the rotation, like Joe Kennedy of the A's. Kennedy has pitched in 185 major-league games, 125 of them starts. He spent last year in the bullpen, though, where he has a career 2.51 ERA. This year, the A's are giving him another run at the rotation. (He has a career 4.96 ERA as a starter.) His start last Friday was his first since Oct. 2, 2005.

And then there's Wainwright, a starter in the minors who inherited the Cardinals' closing role last year from the injured Jason Isringhausen. Wainwright appeared in 61 games last season, all in relief, and saved four games in the postseason without giving up a run. Shortly after he helped carry off the World Series trophy, he was almost immediately shoved into the rotation for '07. Wainwright, 25, made the first start of his major-league career last week, beating the Astros. He started again Tuesday and pitched fairly well, though he didn't get a decision in the Cardinals' win over the Pirates.

"Shortly after the season -- and when I say shortly, I mean like 20 minutes after we got done popping champagne," Wainwright told me during spring training, "[St. Louis manager ] Tony [La Russa] looked at me and said, 'Now all we got to do is figure out whether you're a starter or reliever.'"

It's hard determining whether a bullpen guy has the stuff to be a starter. Starting and relieving are two entirely different disciplines, with unique skill sets required for each. Several pitchers have been at least somewhat successful going from reliever to starter at various times in their careers, including the Dodgers' Derek Lowe, the Braves' John Smoltz, the Mariners' Miguel Batista and Boston's Tim Wakefield.

But there are many, many others who couldn't make a successful leap to the rotation, something that landed them, invariably, back in the 'pen. Success depends on a lot of factors, including the stuff, the stamina and the mental makeup of the pitcher.

Wainwright, for example, showed everyone he had the moxie to handle tight situations last October, famously throwing a gutsy first-pitch changeup to Mets slugger Carlos Beltran in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. He struck out Beltran looking with a looping curveball to send the Cards to the World Series.

The Cardinals have suspected that Wainwright has the stuff to be a starter ever since they grabbed him in a 2003 trade with the Braves. He has good command of a minimum of four pitches -- the curve, at least one type of fastball, a slider and a change -- and starters need more than one or two pitches to survive. Relievers, generally speaking, don't use that many pitches because they don't have time to fool around with them.